Kid PROOF Act of 2025
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Rep. James, John [R-MI-10]
ID: J000307
Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committee on Education and Workforce, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
December 3, 2025
Introduced
Committee Review
đź“Ť Current Status
Next: The bill moves to the floor for full chamber debate and voting.
Floor Action
Passed House
Senate Review
Passed Congress
Presidential Action
Became Law
đź“š How does a bill become a law?
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Bill Summary
Another bill, another opportunity for our esteemed lawmakers to pretend they care about something other than lining their pockets and getting re-elected. Let's dissect this mess.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Kid PROOF Act of 2025 aims to amend the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act to authorize grants for preventing suicide or overdose among children, adolescents, and young adults. How noble. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that mental health is a trendy topic right now, and politicians want to appear compassionate without actually doing anything meaningful.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill expands the definition of eligible entities for grants to include healthcare agencies, hospitals, and non-profit organizations specializing in pediatrics and family medicine. It also adds new provisions for interventions, such as counseling parents on best practices to prevent overdose and suicide, and providing supplies to prevent misuse of lethal means. Because, clearly, the solution to complex mental health issues is more bureaucratic red tape and a few extra dollars thrown at the problem.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects are involved: healthcare providers, non-profit organizations, Indian tribes, and tribal organizations. I'm sure they're all thrilled to have more paperwork and regulations to deal with. Oh, and let's not forget the pharmaceutical companies, who will likely benefit from increased funding for "treatment" and "recovery" programs.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a classic case of treating symptoms rather than the underlying disease. It throws money at a problem without addressing the root causes of mental health issues among young people. The real impact will be felt by the politicians who sponsored this bill, who will now have a shiny new talking point for their re-election campaigns. Meanwhile, the actual problems will persist, and the only ones who will truly benefit are the lobbyists and special interest groups who helped craft this legislation.
**Diagnosis:** This bill is suffering from a bad case of " Politician's Disease," where lawmakers prioritize appearances over actual results. The symptoms include:
* A $2 million allocation for grants, which is roughly equivalent to a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. * The involvement of multiple committees and stakeholders, ensuring that the bill will be watered down and ineffective by the time it passes. * The complete lack of any meaningful reforms or solutions to address the underlying causes of mental health issues.
**Treatment:** The only cure for this disease is a healthy dose of skepticism and scrutiny. We need to hold our politicians accountable for their actions, rather than just their words. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen anytime soon, so we'll just have to settle for mocking their incompetence instead.
Related Topics
đź’° Campaign Finance Network
Rep. James, John [R-MI-10]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 480 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Utilize HMRE funding or grants to provide state-level high school education resources and curriculum on healthy marriages, sexual risk avoidance, and healthy relationships. Early interventions and prevention are much more cost-effective than are efforts to reach people already in broken relationships. l Allow child welfare funding to be used for marriage and relationship education. Congress should adopt the following recommendation from a report issued by members of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee: Children are far more likely to experience abuse when they are raised outside of their married-parent family. Title II of the Child Abuse Preven- tion and Treatment Act provides grants to communities for the purpose of preventing child abuse and neglect, and one of the stated purposes for which the grants can be used is for efforts to increase family stability. However, Congress could change the law to make it clear that Title II funding can be used for healthy marriage and relationship education. Funding provided under Title IV-B of the Social Security Act—which provides grants to states for foster care and adoption services—can also be used for promoting healthy marriage. States should consider using some of their Title IV-B funding for providing healthy marriage and relationship education for families at risk of having their children placed in foster care.65 l Provide educational information on healthy marriage and relationships at Title X family planning clinics. HHS should require clinics it funds under Title X (family planning) to provide information to customers about the importance of marriage to family and personal well-being and refer them to available federal, state, and nonprofit marriage resources. l Ensure proper assessments with enough time to assess HMRE programs. Although some widely available assessments of HMRE programs report poor outcomes, many of these assessments either utilized a poor methodology or tried to measure program success prematurely. Recent assessments have shown increasing effectiveness and positive community- level marital outcomes.66 The HMRE program should receive a fair and realistic assessment. Additionally, the positive role of faith-based programs should be protected — 481 — Department of Health and Human Services and prioritized so that these programs do not receive undue scrutiny or pressure to conform to nonreligious definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act.67 l Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations that maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; or poorer behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes. For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father. Despite recent congressional bills like the Respect for Marriage Act that redefine marriage to be the union between any two individuals, HMRE program grants should be available to faith- based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman. Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) Program. This program is located within the ACF Office of Family Assistance. Its goal, like that of the HMRE program, is to provide marriage and parenting guidance for low-in- come fathers. This includes fatherhood and marriage training, curriculum, and subsequent research. l Implement a pro-fatherhood messaging campaign. With nearly 41 percent of children born without a married father in the home (and nearly 69 percent among black Americans), the fatherhood problem is clear. Similar to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2022 fatherhood bill, HMRF funds should be used to support national messaging campaigns that affirm the role fathers play in the lives of their children, that recognize the financial hardships the fathers themselves face, and that seek to provide relationship education to fathers who were raised without a father in the home. l Fund effective HMRF state programs. Grant allocations should protect and prioritize faith-based programs that incorporate local churches and mentorship programs or increase social capital through multilayered community support (including, for example, job training and social events). Programs should affirm and teach fathers based on a biological and
Introduction
— 302 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Re-evaluate excessive regulation. As for baby formula regulations generally, labeling regulations and regulations that unnecessarily delay the manufacture and sale of baby formula should be re-evaluated.80 During the Biden Administration, there have been devastating baby formula shortages. Return to the Original Purpose of School Meals. Federal meal programs for K–12 students were created to provide food to children from low-income families while at school.81 Today, however, federal school meals increasingly resemble enti- tlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective and represent an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations. The NSLP and SBP are the two largest K–12 meal programs provided by federal taxpayer money. The NSLP launched in 1946 and the SBP in 1966, both as options specifically for children in poverty.82 During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal policymakers temporarily expanded access to school meal programs, but some lawmakers and federal officials have now proposed making this expansion per- manent.83 Yet even before the pandemic, research found that federal officials had already expanded these programs to serve children from upper-income homes, and these programs are rife with improper payments and inefficiencies. Heritage Foundation research from 2019 found that after the enactment of the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) in 2010, the share of students from middle- and upper-income homes receiving free meals in states that participated in CEP doubled, and in some cases tripled—all in a program meant for children from families with incomes at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty line (Children from homes at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line are eligible for free lunches, while students from families at or below 185 percent of poverty are eligible for reduced-priced lunches).84 Under CEP, if 40 percent of students in a school or school district are eligible for federal meals, all students in that school or district can receive free meals. However, the USDA has taken it even further, improperly interpreting the law85 to allow a subset of schools within a district to be grouped together to reach the 40 percent threshold, As a result, a school with zero low-income students could be grouped together with schools with high levels of low-income students, and as a result all the students in the schools within that group (even schools without a single low-in- come student) can receive free federal meals.86 Schools can direct resources meant for students in poverty to children from wealthier families. Furthermore, the NSLP and SBP are among the most inaccurate federal programs according to PaymentAccuracy.gov, a project of the U.S. Office of Man- agement and Budget and the Office of the Inspector General.87 Before federal auditors reduced the rigor of annual reporting requirements in 2018, the NSLP had wasted nearly $2 billion in taxpayer resources through payments provided to ineligible recipients.88 Even after the auditing changes, which the U.S. Government — 303 — Department of Agriculture Accountability Office said results in the USDA not “regularly assess[ing] the pro- grams’ fraud risks,” the NSLP wasted nearly $500 million in FY 2021.89 The SBP now wastes nearly $200 million annually.90 Despite the ongoing effort to expand school meals under CEP and the evidence of waste and inefficiency, left-of-center Members of Congress and President Biden’s Administration have nonetheless proposed further expansions to extend federal school meals to include every K–12 student—regardless of need.91 The Administra- tion recently proposed expanding federal school meal programs offered during the school year to be offered during the summer as part of the “American Families Plan,” and also proposed expanding CEP. Other federal officials, including Senator Bernie Sanders (I–VT), have, in recent years, proposed expanding the NSLP to all students.92 To serve students in need and prevent the misuse of taxpayer money, the next Administration should focus on students in need and reject efforts to transform federal school meals into an entitlement program. Specifically, the next Administration should: l Promulgate a rule properly interpreting CEP. The USDA should issue a rule that clarifies that only an individual school or a school district as a whole, not a subset of schools within a district, must meet the 40-percent criteria to be eligible for CEP. Education officials should be prohibited from grouping schools together. l Work with lawmakers to eliminate CEP. The NSLP and SBP should be directed to serve children in need, not become an entitlement for students from middle- and upper-income homes. Congress should eliminate CEP. Further, the USDA should not provide meals to students during the summer unless students are taking summer-school classes. Currently, students can get meals from schools even if they are not in summer school, which has, in effect, turned school meals into a federal catering program.93 l Restore programs to their original intent and reject efforts to create universal free school meals. The USDA should work with lawmakers to restore NSLP and SBP to their original goal of providing food to K–12 students who otherwise would not have food to eat while at school. Federal school meals should be focused on children in need, and any efforts to expand student eligibility for federal school meals to include all K–12 students should be soundly rejected. Such expansion would allow an inefficient, wasteful program to grow, magnifying the amount of wasted taxpayer resources. Reform Conservation Programs. Farmers, in general, are excellent stewards of the land, if not for moral or ethical considerations, then out of self-interest to
Introduction
— 302 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Re-evaluate excessive regulation. As for baby formula regulations generally, labeling regulations and regulations that unnecessarily delay the manufacture and sale of baby formula should be re-evaluated.80 During the Biden Administration, there have been devastating baby formula shortages. Return to the Original Purpose of School Meals. Federal meal programs for K–12 students were created to provide food to children from low-income families while at school.81 Today, however, federal school meals increasingly resemble enti- tlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective and represent an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations. The NSLP and SBP are the two largest K–12 meal programs provided by federal taxpayer money. The NSLP launched in 1946 and the SBP in 1966, both as options specifically for children in poverty.82 During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal policymakers temporarily expanded access to school meal programs, but some lawmakers and federal officials have now proposed making this expansion per- manent.83 Yet even before the pandemic, research found that federal officials had already expanded these programs to serve children from upper-income homes, and these programs are rife with improper payments and inefficiencies. Heritage Foundation research from 2019 found that after the enactment of the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) in 2010, the share of students from middle- and upper-income homes receiving free meals in states that participated in CEP doubled, and in some cases tripled—all in a program meant for children from families with incomes at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty line (Children from homes at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line are eligible for free lunches, while students from families at or below 185 percent of poverty are eligible for reduced-priced lunches).84 Under CEP, if 40 percent of students in a school or school district are eligible for federal meals, all students in that school or district can receive free meals. However, the USDA has taken it even further, improperly interpreting the law85 to allow a subset of schools within a district to be grouped together to reach the 40 percent threshold, As a result, a school with zero low-income students could be grouped together with schools with high levels of low-income students, and as a result all the students in the schools within that group (even schools without a single low-in- come student) can receive free federal meals.86 Schools can direct resources meant for students in poverty to children from wealthier families. Furthermore, the NSLP and SBP are among the most inaccurate federal programs according to PaymentAccuracy.gov, a project of the U.S. Office of Man- agement and Budget and the Office of the Inspector General.87 Before federal auditors reduced the rigor of annual reporting requirements in 2018, the NSLP had wasted nearly $2 billion in taxpayer resources through payments provided to ineligible recipients.88 Even after the auditing changes, which the U.S. Government
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.